Use of questionnaire-based data to assess dog personality

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Abstract

The study of dog personality is of general academic interest and also has applications for the management
of both working dogs and pets. However, acquiring direct behavioral assessments of large numbers
of animals is both time consuming and logistically difficult. An alternative approach that is becoming
increasingly common is the collection of questionnaire-based information directly from dog owners. In
this review, we discuss some commonly used questionnaires for dog personality traits and findings that
have been published using these tools. We suggest that the use of such questionnaires may contribute to
research that is based on estimation of effects from large sample sizes, for example, genomic analyses of
dog personality traits.
2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND
license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).